Pre-reading Questions宝贝故事
1. Have you ever been in a situation where you were considered "different" from everyone el? What happened? How did you feel?
2. What happened to the writer when he was 12 years old? Skim the first paragraph to find out.
3. How did he feel at that time? Skim the cond paragraph to find out. How do you think you'd have felt in his position?
I Became Her Target
By Roger Wilkins
奶的笔画
My favorite teacher's name was "Dead-Eye" Bean. Her real name was Dorothy. She taught American history to eighth graders in a junior high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was the fall of 1944, Franklin D. Roovelt was president; American troops were battling their way across France; Joe DiMaggio was still in the rvice; the Montgomery bus boycott was more than a decade away, and I was a 12-year-old black newcomer in a school that was otherwi all white.
My mother, who had been a widow in New Y ork., had married my stepfather, a Grand Rapids physician, the year before, and he had bought the best hou he could afford for his new family. The problem for our new neighbors was that their neighborhood had previously been pristine (in their terms) and they were ignorant about black people. The prevailing wisdom in the neighborhood was that we were spoiling it and that we ought to go back where we belonged. (or alternatively, ought not intrude where we were not wanted). There was a lot of angry talk among the adults, but nothing much came of it.
But some of the kids, tho first few weeks, were quite nasty. They threw stones at me, chad me home when I was on foot and spat on my bike at when I was in class. For a time, I was a pretty lonely, friendless and sometimes frightened kid. I was just transplanted from Harlem, and here in Grand Rapids, the dominant culture was speaking to me insistently.
I can e now that tho youngsters were bullying and culturally disadvantaged. I knew then that they were bigoted, but the culture spoke to me more powerfully than my mind and I felt ashamed for being different – a nonstandard person.有关动物的谜语
I now know that Dorothy Bean understood most of that and deplored it. So things began to change w
hen I walked into her classroom. She was a pleasant-looking single woman, who looked old and wrinkled to me at the time, but who was probably about 40.
Whereas my other teachers approached the problem of easing in their new black pupil by ignoring him for the first few weeks, Miss Bean went right at me. On the morning after having read our first assignment, she asked me the first question. I later came to know that in Grand Rapids, she was viewed as a very liberal person who believed, among other things, that Negroes were equal.肿胀造句
I gulped and answered her question and the follow-up. They weren't brilliant answers, but they did establish the fact that I could speak English. Later in the hour, when one of my classmates had bungled an answer, Miss Bean came back to me with a question that required me to clean up the girl's mess and established me as a smart person.
间字成语Thus, the teacher began to give me human dimensions, though not perfect ones for an eighth grader. It was somewhat better to be an incipient teacher's pet than merely a dark prence in the back of the room onto who silent form my classmates could fit all the stereotypes they carried in their heads.
A few days later, Miss Bean became the first teacher ever to require me to think. She asked my opini
车牌损坏如何更换on about something Jefferson had done. In tho days, all my opinions were derivative. I was for Roovelt becau my parents were and I was for the Y ankees becau my older buddy from Harlem was a Y ankee fan. Besides, we didn't have opinions about historical figures like Jefferson. Like our high school building, he just was.
After I had stared at her for a few conds, she said: "Well, should he have bought Louisiana or not?"
"I guess so," I replied tentatively.
"Why?" she shot back.
Why! What kind of question was that, I groud silently. But I ventured an answer. Day after day, she kept doing that to me, and my answers became stronger and more confident. She was the first teacher to give me the n that thinking was part of education and that I could form opinions that had some value.
Her final rvice to me came on a day when my mind was wandering and I was idly
并驾齐驱digging my pencil into the writing surface on the arm of my chair. Miss Bean impulsively threw a hun
k of gum erar at me. By amazing chance, it hit my hand and nt the pencil flying. She gasped, and I crept hurriedly after my pencil as the class roared. That was the ice breaker.
不逊的读音Afterward, kids came up to me to laugh about "Old Dead-Eye Bean." The incident became a legend, and I, a part of that story, became a person to talk to.
So that's how I became just another kid in school and Dorothy Bean became "Old Dead-Eye."
